Richard
by Drucilla
Summary: A brief vignette set before Richard III. Inspired by Tom McCamus' brilliant performance at Stratford 2002. Co-authored with Ezekiel Fall


Something. Anything. Everything.  
  
What do I want? I don't know what I want. Not really. Or, sure, I know I do'nt want to be right here, right now. Walking along a practically deserted street, hands shoved into my pockets, head bowed to the rain. My shoulders are so hunched over it's giving me back pains. I always have back pains now, did you know? And I always walk hunched over. Mothers pull their children to the other side of the street when they see me. I hope they get run down. Bastards.  
  
They say it can't rain forever. But in his city it seems to do nothing else. Floods of filthy, scummy water drown the city till the stench is palpable. The rich try to hide themselves in their cloying, sweet houses, surrounded by spiced candles and fancy clothing. The poor have to live with it, but at least they can be washed clean in the rain, and baked dry in the sun.  
  
I hate the sun. I hate the rain. I hate the wind carrying sticky smells along narrow streets, depositing sand down my neck, itching, itching... If only I could stand still and straight, silent, at peace, and alone. Then I could be not only a man, like my brothers, but a legend. And of course the muscles in my back seize up again, threatening to pitch me forward. Perhaps the ground is where I belong, amongst the dirt and the rats. Perhaps I would find solace there.  
  
The earth is more forgiving than man, more yielding and pliable. Perhaps it is where I belong, but I am not yet ready to be consigned to earth. Why should it be so more yielding and sweet, when man is supposedly made of earth? I don't know. The cruelty of fate, of nature, or of destiny. The mud clings to my boots, knowing that the earth is where I belong. But not yet, not yet.  
  
Children hiding in their mothers' arms walk freer than I can, clumping along with uneven gait, blisters forming, muscles protesting and twisted. My body reminds me that I should not even be trying - should just lie down and rest until the twinges cease. That, unfortunately, is a joke. They never do. Poor Richard is knotted up like a noose. He sees all death, all release, and finds none himself. Predictably, painfully, I trip on the path, and, bored with it all, expect the dirty pain of a fall. Instead, I find a hand on my shoulder.  
  
SHE is certainly not made of earth. Whatever she is made of it must be something fine, like starlight, or snow, or moonbeams. Her eyes are black and twinkling as the night sky, and even as the thought runs through my mind I shiver in disgust. Yet there is something about her that invites poetry, and pleasure, and all exquisite things. What she is doing in this muddy, stench-ridden street I cannot guess, nor yet what she is doing with her hand on such a creature as I am.  
  
She is not a whore. I understand that much, for none of their kind would have stooped to help me, Richard, that thing that came crawling amongst them in his younger years for succour. The little beast who couldn't even manage to pleasure himself, for the vile pain it caused him, kicked at and bruised by more than words. But it was the words which remained, after the cuts had healed, and left him an animal, not tamed, but wounded, lurking far from comfort, and without a home. I get to my crooked feet once more, biting my lip as muscles protest, eyes locked on her.  
  
She must be a lady. She is dressed for the courts, for their incenses and their dances and their feasting. But if she is a lady, then why is she out in the rain with the common? She is garbed in a dress embroidered with gold and now spattered with mud and things that don't bear thinking about. She doesn't seem to care. She watches me as I watch her, and will not look away.  
  
Damn you, woman. Do not pity me. I will not endure the pain of it.  
  
I seem to sense her smiling, and I assume she is laughing at me, but the touch remains, and no one who ever ridiculed me could bear the thought of touching my skin, however clean or muscled I may be. As I assumed, her fingers disappear, but then she is in front of me, her fingers finding mine.  
  
"Come." I am not sure if she says it, or if I see it in her eyes, but I go with her, and find my feet strangely obedient.  
  
At her touch my body obeys, and is this jealousy I feel that it responds so readily to her but not to me? Possibly, but I don't care. The pain is fleeing, at one remove, if it remains it no longer seems to matter. And still she refuses to shrink from me, or drop my hand, or any such sign of repulsion. I follow where she leads; I have never followed any man before.  
  
I remember the night when I stopped dreaming, when someone whose name And face I choose to forget grabbed me up, a small twisted thing of a boy, from my tear-stained bedsheets and told me that if I did not stop my incessant wailing, I would be killed. That made me silent, not for much fear, but for the time it took me to debate within myself whether this could possibly be true. Then, with a hissing whisper, I was told that soon I would die anyway. No monster child such as Richard was could ever live to be a man. From then on, I slept, but with one eye open, and no dreams of women would ever dare to come close.  
  
This woman can be no mortal creature, to close in as she has. Perhaps she is of the faery kingdom, used to such twisted creatures as she is now leading to an unknown destination. Or perhaps she truly is like the other women at court... laugh at the shambling fool, keep him in the court and kick him for your pleasure. Whatever my fate is to be, I am following her, to be kicked or cursed. Well, it is nothing new. But now I am wondering...  
  
I am used to thinking that stone walls encapsulate nothing but fraudulent thieves of prestige, first born idiot sons to idiot fathers and their giggling imbecile wives. The city causes me nothing but pain, and boredom, and pain so wrenching no other man could stand it. Can I? I have done, but the sight of her, leading me on, makes me tired of the struggle against my own self, and it is only once we pass inside the tower that I find my senses awake once more. A tower? I have little idea where we are, for in my crippled youth I crawled around the forts and castles of England while my brothers learned how to be idiots, and I do not recognise this place. The draft at my back ceases as she gently closes the door.  
  
Inside it is dry, and warm, a curious contrast to the constant state of the outdoors except that it is also dark. There are no giant, overweening candelabras here; no desperate attempt to push back the spirits and the darkness. This place, wherever or whatever it may be, seems to welcome the darkness with a friendly candle, instead. The shadows are comforting, not frightening; the noises I hear are ones that might lull a child to sleep instead of keep a grown man lying awake for fear of nightmare.  
  
My lady seems at home here, I realize, even as she seems to suddenly be at home in my thoughts, an intrusion I never sought out but seems to come creeping in whether I will it or no.  
  
I seem out of place here, awkward as I stand, clothes rigid and wet against my skin, unsure of what she expects me to do, or even why I now care about either her wishes or common manners. As a boy I would feel this way, lost and alone amongst ceremony and circumstance which did not allow for crippled wretches, and until now I had ignored their petty needs and wants as they had mine, but the lady...  
  
And she is a lady, one of few I would recognise as such beyond hereditary titles won by some heroic grandfather for a foolish grandson and his whore of a wife. She looks at me with such... tenderness that would make me speak thanks if I were not struck dumb. My lady smiles at me, and it is an arrow through my eye as I realise the water pooling around my booted feet, but cannot find the words to apologise. I have never needed to speak what I believed to be false pleasantries before, and now... I falter, and let her come to me.  
  
She touches me, touches my hair. Suddenly I am acutely aware of how wet, dripping mud and filth, unfit for this lady's presence I am. Her hand comes away wet, and spattered with mud. I look away, somewhere, anywhere to keep from looking at that hand, stained where it should not be. She should be pure, clean, and nowhere near me. And I still do not understand. Her voice is in my ears, and I hear the words only minutes later...  
  
How can mere words seem so foreign to me, even when they seem to be spoken in my own native tongue? My name... Which even my family avoid as much as they do me, never to be mentioned in the counsels to which cripples may not be privy. And something else... a sentiment which in other situations would have me bent double with laughter. In a voice quiet but nowhere near timid, she tells me not to be afraid as she smoothes back the dark hair grained with dirt from where it is plastered to my cheek, and kisses me.  
  
Silence.  
  
Silence, and the soft dripping of water in the back of my mind, and the moment freezes itself in my mind. At the same time I cannot believe what has just transpired, and can think of nothing else, and cannot understand it at all. The one, brief touch, like fire in my veins, and yet there is anger there as well. Is she toying with me? She must be, no one else does what she has done for any other reason. I raise my hand to strike her, and she is no longer there... and then she is behind me, and something warm and soft and heavy is about my shoulders, reminding me suddenly of how cold and sodden I am. I shake, and I am tired, and suddenly it is all too, too much to bear.  
  
I close my eyes, and expect to die. The slow, sterile knife weirding its hot path through my ribs, the blood warm and reassuring me with its steady pumping flow. It is not a bad way to die... At least, it is the death I have been expecting ever since the boy Richard crept underneath rotting blankets, too afraid to peep more than his eyes out into the darkness of his fortress room. But the safety and surety of death does not come. She is giving it to me without the pain, and while I feel every move of her fingers over my sodden clothing, I hardly comprehend what she is doing. I feel strange as a corpse being prepared for burial, but the (surely mistaken) brush of her fingertips over my flesh convinces m that I must yet be alive.  
  
Where her hands go there seems to follow a lingering warmth, as though my entire life had been lived in the cold rain of this city, and I was never warm until now. When I shiver, it is no longer because of cold, but a heat so strong is burns me from the inside out. And when I finally open my eyes to the source of all this warmth and comfort, security and protection, I am surprised to find her yet there, not melted away as a dream.  
  
My instinct is to cringe for the evidence of my nakedness, whipped scars along my back evidence enough of what my body has been used for - the laughing, jeering pleasure of others as the cripple bleeds and screams and sprawls on the floor. He grew up a man who would stand his ground silently, if punishment had to touch him at all, and now finds himself beaten by compassion which knocks the air out of my lungs, makes me mute, and casts my eyes to the ground for fear of conveying something in a glance which I should never think.  
  
My lady steps back, her fingers touching mine, and I find myself embarrassed of myself, of this withered arm I have worn as a badge of honour for so many years, but now trails uselessly, stiffly, down towards where, I fear, something has been awakened which should have been left to sleep.  
  
I cannot look at her. Not as this, a rude and low beast seeking rut with a blind instinct. I should be a man, and stand with more dignity than I crouch and shudder now. I should be so many things, and for her I would be them all, but I can only be a twisted and wracked... and weeping... *thing* at her feet.  
  
She does not relent, does not cringe away, as she has never done in our brief meeting. When she is done I am wrapped entirely in warm, soft blankets, comforted and cared for as I have never been nor yet seen anyone be, but babes in their poor mothers' arms who do not have the upbringing to know better. She pulls me into an embrace and I am again undone, but it no longer seems to matter. I allow myself, for a few moments, to think that perhaps I have found peace.  
  
She touches me, touches my hair. Suddenly I am acutely aware of how wet, dripping mud and filth, unfit for this lady's presence I am. Her hand comes away wet, and spattered with mud. I look away, somewhere, anywhere to keep from looking at that hand, stained where it should not be. She should be pure, clean, and nowhere near me. And I still do not understand. Her voice is in my ears, and I hear the words only minutes later...  
  
How can mere words seem so foreign to me, even when they seem to be spoken in my own native tongue? My name... Which even my family avoid as much as they do me, never to be mentioned in the counsels to which cripples may not be privy. And something else... a sentiment which in other situations would have me bent double with laughter. In a voice quiet but nowhere near timid, she tells me not to be afraid as she smooths back the dark hair grained with dirt from where it is plastered to my cheek, and kisses me.  
  
I do not love. Have not. It washes against my skin and is repelled like so much dirty water. No love has been absorbed into my veins, no sweet youth's temptation has ever entered my brain, but she... I close my eyes and forget the broken, twisted boy of a man that is Richard. I am become warmth and rest and release from the physical. For the first time in my life, I am ready to lie down with this woman and simply sleep, without caring if I wake. She kisses me gently, and holds me, and I lose myself in her arms. This is solace. Let me go.  
  
For an instant I think I have spoken the words, as her soft grip around my painless shoulders lessens a little, and I curse myself for the misunderstanding. I open my eyes to see the leather-clad bowman behind her, even as the bolt which has penetrated her heart scratches at my chest. With a rush of expelled air, I remember to fear...and to hurt... and to hate.  
  
Rage, all the sharper for the brief moment of joy I have known, empowers me. The pain returns, and I welcome it for the sensation of contrast it gives me. I use the memory of the one single point in time when pain did not exist for me, and I sharpen it into a knife that thrusts between the bowman's ribs. He is dead before he hits the ground, and my only regret is that he never knew what he did when he let his arrow fly.  
  
I turn back. Her eyes are glazed, and I have seen death often enough to recognize it when it sneers in my face. I close her eyes, cover her in a shroud too meager for her grace and beauty. My lady, I wish I had known you longer. I wish I had been able to convey what you did for me in those few moments. I wish the bolt meant for me (for surely it was meant to strike me) had pierced my heart and not yours... I would have died in happiness, something I never thought to do. I pull myself back together, returning pain to my body as I again don my still-soaking robes. Quietly, no longer able to be in view of the tragedy that tore me apart, I leave.  
  
I know what I want now. I want them to wake up shivering in an icy night. I want them to be alone in the dark cold which surrounds my bones and creeps into my heart. I want them to scream out and hear nothing but death echoing back. I want a winter. And I can wait. But not for long. 


End file.
